Henry Moore's sculpture: Drawing

Artists often use drawings to develop their ideas. Henry Moore used drawing to work out how to transform the shapes of objects that inspired him into the strange and beautiful shapes for his sculptures

This is what Henry Moore said about drawing:

My drawings are done mainly as a help towards making sculpture…as a way of sorting out ideas and developing them

In Henry Moore’s imagination, rocks and stones became people. Can you see the shapes of rocks and stones in this drawing?

Inside and out

In this drawing Henry Moore seems to be working out the shape and structure for a sculpture that has two different things happening: an outside shape and also a more complicated inside shape (which he draws using thick black lines).

From the 1930s, Henry Moore began to make sculptures that explored both the inside and outside of objects. You can see examples of some of these sculptures in the pictures below. The sculptures are quite complicated, but by using drawing he could work out his ideas and how he could make the sculptures work, before actually creating them.